This application generally relates to the tracking and production of print jobs and/or mailing of multiple component documents.
Printing and mailing of high quality financial documents, such as periodic billing statements, monthly invoices, DDA statements, coupon payment books, late notices, welcome notices and a host of other time critical printed or other materials is often performed by a third party for a financial entity. It will be appreciated that many of these print and/or mailing jobs requires multiple components to be printed, properly sequenced, and then packaged and mailed to a designated party in a timely manner. Further, the production of these time critical materials often requires complicated sorting and/or transformation of individual components into each product in a batch of products that will be shipped to a specific end user, often with each specific end user receiving a product that is slightly different from the other end products produced in the same batch. Since the information printed on each individual product, statement, or other individualized material is private, sensitive, and often time sensitive, each print job is preferably performed accurately, and any printing errors or sorting errors are preferably traceable. Since each printing and/or sorting job often requires the use of multiple different machines to process a job, tracing the print status for each document and/or job is a meticulous and difficult task that has proven to be difficult to implement.
In past systems, attempting to track each individual document/product or the status of a print job is located was accomplished by using a document counter and manually placing a tag on the ends of trays to determine the job number and first document number on the tray as well as the last document number present in the tray. Essentially, each individual page in a document or product that is added at each stage of production was added up, and every multiple of that sum was considered to be its own separate document. With a page counter or electronic eye counting each individual document passing through a production point, an individual document or product could be theoretically tracked through each station by knowing the number of the individual document or product in the sequence of print/process jobs, knowing the number of pages in a particular document or product at a particular place in the production of the document or product, and having the total page count of documents for a total batch or job that had passed a particular counter or electronic eye at a particular point. For example, if one knew that John Doe's zero coupon book was document number eight (8) in a batch of coupon books that are scheduled to each be ten pages each when they pass a first page counter or electronic eye, one could know that pages 81 through 90 should be John Doe's coupon book when it passes that first page counter or electronic eye.
However, when using this system, many assumptions have to be made that the print or processing procedure was perfect, and any documents that were pulled due to printing issues, customer request for removal, etc. would introduce errors into the tracking system, and could change the sequence and accuracy of the documents inserted in to each document or product in that batch, thereby ruining each individual document and potentially subjecting the mailer to the liability of exposing private information to the wrong individual. Therefore, as a set number of documents passed the page counter or electronic eye, usually in an amount equal to the number of packets that would fit on a tray or skid to be transferred to another processing station (a “bundle” or “tray” of documents or products), the first and last document in each tray or bundle was checked and be tracked by hand and recorded manually on a spreadsheet, with the completion of each job leading to the recording of the job as complete. Since progress for any given print or mail job was documented by hand, no real-time tracking of a print job was available, and tracking of machine down times and estimated mailing or delivery times had to be specifically requested and calculated on a per-job basis with additional man-hours devoted to such tracking.